Month: May 2010

Kerry Howley reviews Dreamers of a New Day by Sheila Rowbotham:

You can be fairly sure that a thirty-year-old American self-identified feminist today is a fan of birth control, Medicare, and democracy. In 1890 one could make no such assumptions about a pro-woman radical. She might well support free love but think condoms a tool of the sex-mad patriarchy; she might want to socialize housework or smash the state. One is struck, paging through this idiosyncratic survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers, by the enthusiasm for a kind of fluid, shape-shifting self-conception…

If the period Rowbotham surveys was indeed characterized by wide-eyed "optimistic imagining," our own time is striking for the narrowness of its political and economic questions.

The successes of feminism and market capitalism (the latter trend evidenced by the desperate use of words like socialist and fascist to describe various shades of market-friendly moderates in American political discourse) have bequeathed to today's feminists a straitened range of internecine dispute. Movement types are less likely to question the gender assumptions of liberal democracy than to argue about the importance of a female president, less likely to discuss the machinery of production than to discuss the role of woman as consumer. This comparatively fixed framework, this shift from sprawling questions to well-defined goals, is a symptom of progress. And yet after reading Rowbotham it's hard not to notice the comparative tininess of today's tent.

Scientist and biotech entrepreneur William Haseltine challenges the importance of the synthetic cell story. While agreeing the research is significant, he argues that the breakthrough has been blown out of proportion:

Has man indeed made life? I think not. The replica is indistinguishable in form and function from the original. Were it not for marker tags introduced into the replica DNA, there would be no difference at all. It is as if one were to create a copy of Michelangelo's David, accurate down to the last crack and imperfection except for the signature, and call it new. Is the organism so created useful? No more so than the original, most famous for being small, with no known use outside the laboratory.

Will this work open a new era of modern biology? Again unlikely. That door was opened some time ago with the advent of genetic engineering that allows functioning genes of one organism to be inserted into another (think of the human gene for insulin inserted in bacterium to produce the replacement hormone for diabetics), and more recently by mixing and matching the genes from many different species to create new useful biochemical pathways. For example, nine different genes, some from bacteria and some from plants, were spliced into yeast DNA to direct the production of an anti-malarial drug previously only obtainable from a tropical plant. Similar methods have already been used to ferment diesel and jet fuel. These techniques are part of a rapidly growing field I call "constructive biology," but now goes by the unfortunate name "synthetic biology."

(Image: Electron micrographs by Tom Deerinck and Mark Ellisman of the NCMIR at UCSD)

Avent defends the district against Friedersdorf's assault:

People blame the city of Washington for all kinds of things, and they’re almost always wrong to do so. They are especially wrong when they blame the city for generating this kind of corrosive camaraderie or group think. The Washington metropolitan area is home to nearly 6 million people (over 8 million if you count the Baltimore metro area). The central 125 square miles or so are home to just over 1 million people. If you can’t help but spend all your time with the same people, you might want to start by asking whether it isn’t your own shortcomings that need attention, rather than Washington’s.

Friedersdorf continues the thread by asking what would happen if "we reformed the insular nature of Washington DC by dispersing its powerful political figures throughout the country?""

Today on the Dish, Pelosi got bolder over ending DADT, we checked in on the size of the oil spill, and Andrew let out a great lament. He also took another long look at the Beinart-led debate on Israel.  In the wake of Rand Paul bailing on Meet the Press, Ambers thought he will weather the storm, several bloggers assessed his libertarian cred on foreign policy, Julian Sanchez addressed the conflict between his idealism and the real world, TNC examined the racist baggage plaguing many libertarians, and a reader wrung his hands over the media's treatment of Rand.

In other coverage, a Republican won the seat of Obama's birthplace, Ricks relayed a daunting report on getting stuck in Afghanistan, and a new twist on the Malawi couple surfaced. Palin told another pernicious lie, a former conservative pointed his finger at her, even Pete Wehner couldn't defend her, and Todd, as it turns out, appeared to make most of the decisions.

Bruce Bartlett predicted a political storm over Medicare and slapped conservatives over military spending. John Seabrook sang the praises of adoption while a few readers took exception. More on the origins of Jesus Christ here and here, More on the essence of hippies here.  A video version of the Hewitt Award here, a kick-ass nature clip here, and a cool ad for the World Cup here.

— C.B.

Greenwald asks why "do Americans, seemingly regardless of party affiliation or geographic location, despise the political establishment?" Jonathan Bernstein answers:

The key to public opinion, especially when it's about abstractions divorced from practical day-to-day life, is that it follows opinion leaders. And all opinion leaders in America are against the establishment. In fact, no opinion leaders in America will admit to being part of the establishment! Virtually every president in my memory, from Nixon on with the possible exception of George H. W. Bush, not only ran against Washington to get elected but continued to campaign against Washington from the White House. Look at Obama — he's not the establishment! He's not even the establishment of the Democratic Party; that's the message of keeping his grass-roots insurgent organization, OFA, running. Over on the Republican side, surely no one — not Rush Limbaugh, not Glenn Beck or anyone at Fox News, and certainly not the Republican Party's most recent nominee for vice president — would admit to being part of the dreaded establishment.

Or, in Julian Sanchez's words:

Apparently being part of "the establishment" is like being a hipster: even the paradigm cases have to deny it.

A reader writes:

As I read this to my husband his first reaction was "BULLSHIT!"  Yes, I was the one who was pregnant, and I gained weight, and I gave up alcohol, and I went through labor … so what? What WE got in return was true joy. My husband actually caught my daughters as they were being delivered so he saw them and held them before I did. He cut their cords, which disconnected the physical relationship I had with OUR babies. He changed their first diapers. I don't think I changed a diaper until we got home from the hospital. Since I was unable to breastfeed (a rare inability to produce breast milk), he was the first to feed OUR girls. He gave them their first baths and continued to do so until it was no long appropriate. Just because OUR girls spent 41 weeks in my womb did not make either me or my husband further ahead in the parenting process. Making these babies was a two person process and so is raising them.

Another writes:

I did not feel I was in some way behind in building my relationship with our newborn or that my wife had somehow been carrying the early parenthood load more than I. I was not pregnant, so I did not share those physical-biological experiences.  But my role in her life in those months was not de minimus.  Similarly, my role in her serious illness before (and not related to) her pregnancy, and my role in a subsequent miscarriage.  In all three cases, the core experience was hers since is was in her body.  But in each case I contributed meaningfully to our team approach to dealing with the situation we faced, and looking back, I felt (and feel) no need to "atone" or "catch up."

A Giraffe eats a branch of leaves given by a visitor at the National Zoo in Kuala Lumpur on May 23, 2010. The 47 year-old National Zoo, locally known as Zoo Negara, consists of around 5000 animals from 459 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, covering 110 acres of land. By Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images.

Matt Steinglass unloads:

The spill has so far cost BP $760m dollars. The company's stock has fallen by a quarter. That was inevitable. What was not inevitable is the damage the company has done to its own reputation by continuing to lowball its estimates of the magnitude of the spill.

A reader writes:

Your reader indulges in the timeless rhetorical strategy of saying "plainly false" to mean "I no longer believe this."  The earliest Christian writing are not the Gospels but the letters of Paul, and his assertions of Christ's divinity are as clear as anything you could ever want.  The letter to the Phillipians (c 62 AD), almost a decade before the earliest gospel, has Jesus in the "form" or "nature" of God and emptied himself to be born in human likeness.  And even leaving aside the gospel of John, it's hard to deny that Luke-Acts makes clear statements about Christs's divinity. And the famously excluded Gospel of Thomas has an even less human Jesus.

Fitting together the simultaneous claims of divinity and humanity is the central paradoxical (not contradictory) claim of Christianity, and occupied much of Christian theology for its first four centuries. There were many many ways that Christians tried this, from the Docetic "Jesus only pretended to be human but never really suffered" all the way down to the more Jeffersonian "Jesus was a pretty cool ethics teacher." And many of those options are in Scripture itself, which indeed quite happily shows a number of different perspectives. They — unlike contemporary fundamentalists (and their opposite numbers, the academic biblical deconstructionists) — were quite aware that you could not reduce such complexities to the ideological clarity of "plainly true" or "plainly false".

Xiamen, China, 4.52 pm